By Lanie Brice
“It’s my son,” Lauv announces confidently when asked about the identity of the child speaking in the bridge of his latest single. Then a smile breaks onto his face and he starts laughing. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I did post a TikTok saying ‘Y’all didn’t know this was my son,’ and people really…” he says before cutting himself off, still deeply amused. As someone who recently spent a solid five minutes of my one wild and precious life puzzling over whether I missed a very important something, I immediately knew what he was referencing, and I wasn’t alone in my confusion. “It’s my manager’s son,” he clarifies before sharing an incredibly sweet story about how Joshua would give him words of encouragement over Face Time during lockdown.
But that TikTok is also perfectly emblematic of the kind of artist and celebrity Lauv is. He’s open and unguarded on social media, often sharing absolutely absurd, silly videos, and he frequently opens up in his music about his personal life whether its very publicly admitting to past mistakes like on “Julia” from his debut album or co-writing a love song with his current girlfriend, Sophie Cates. But he also carries an air of likely unintentional mystery that had me ready to accept that I’d just casually missed the sub-plot where he had a child. That’s the enigma of Lauv I’ve spent longer than I’d like to admit trying to figure out.
Each of Lauv’s three projects – i met you when i was 18, ~ How I’m Feeling ~, and All 4 Nothing – have been born of very specific periods of life. The EP and albums become diaries left in the wake of different eras, full of lessons learned and reflections made.“My life didn’t really start till college, and as soon as I went to college, I fell in love, and I was in a relationship pretty much all of college,” Lauv explains, reflecting on the origins of his first project. “When I moved to LA, my whole heart and mind was filled with reflection on that relationship and what it meant to fall in love and to be in New York.”
The next chapter, then, became directly informed by the work created on the pages before. “The music I made out of that just blew up so much I started to get taken for this ride… touring all the time, doing all this stuff. That, honestly, lead me to a place of loneliness, so that naturally turned into a lot of what How I’m Feeling was about,” he observes, though later is quick to go back and clarify his gratefulness for his career and those opportunities.
Which brings the narrative to the current project, still an era behind the present day. “All 4 Nothing was me being like, I am not happy as a person,” he remarks about the inciting moment. “I was so unhappy on the inside and felt so anxious all the time that my next journey was, okay, let me define what happiness is for myself, and let me go and find that.” He describes All 4 Nothing as his path out of all the loneliness that shrouded his last project.
Even with the album yet to come out, Lauv is ever focused on the future. “So I’m wondering what’s going to come next. The next album – it’s definitely too early to say – but it’s definitely going to be the best one yet,” he promises. Stay tuned for 2024 for the “best one yet,” but until then, it’s a menu of inner child meditations and finding yourself in good and bad places.
Lauv describes the process of creating All 4 Nothing as a “confidence building journey” progressing from being a ball of anxiety to finding “peace” and “gratitude” inside, regardless of whatever disaster the outside world is going to stir up next. With the well of bad news constantly overflowing for years now, there’s a definite appeal to meditation and internal work that offers the hope of calm from within. This album also marked a period of Lauv’s life where he realized that even the external highs weren’t going to offer the joy or fulfillment he needed. Instead of new career milestones, he went searching for his own “inner light.”
A large part of that quest was rooted in digging further into his relationship with mental health and mental healthcare. Known as an outspoken advocate sharing his own experiences with clinical depression and OCD in 2019, donating the proceeds from his single, “Sad Forever,” to mental health charities, and encouraging more open conversations around mental health, Lauv shares that he wasn’t always so aware.
“For most of my life, up until a few years ago… I feel like I had no understanding, really, even though there was stuff that I was experiencing, witnessing firsthand for a really long time. It wasn’t until I had my own big, huge, massive, shitty low where I was finally like okay, I’m not able to just keep going to this therapist and getting by. There’s more that needs to happen. Maybe I need to speak to some other therapists,” he remembers.
“At a certain point, I was in such a bad place… I was so resistant to even going to somebody like a psychiatrist because there was such a stigma around the idea of taking pills to fix your brain.” He shares how he initially dismissed the idea wholeheartedly as some kind of indication of failure. “Meanwhile, think of all the medicine that we take for anything, pain medicine,” he offers to show the absurdity of the cultural perception. After taking the step past the stigma, though, he quickly realized how beneficial those tools are.
Lauv then recognized that his own negative experiences offered him a “language” for discussing things like anxiety and depression and created a “natural” drive to talk about it. “This is everywhere,” he impresses. “We are all experiencing some version of something that is of the mind. Since then, it’s become deeper and deeper for me – my love of the exploration of the mind, how I can better take care of myself, better respond to others.”
His evolving relationship to mental health has also lead to a new understanding of spirituality that’s heavily explored on All 4 Nothing as well. “It became not only just talk therapy and medication but meditation and starting to be open to the things that are kind of, I don’t know, maybe,” he starts before sheepishly saying, “woo-woo.”
After discovering what works in his own life, Lauv wants to bring those practices to his fans, revealing he wants to “guide mediations” and “hang out”, possibly on Instagram Live or Twitter Spaces. The more he thinks about the idea, the more enthusiastic he becomes. “Honestly, a podcast would be really sick too.” All of these ideas are building towards Lauv’s new approach to finding connection with his fans on the Internet, something many artists have reassessed since the world first went into hibernation back in 2020. “One of the things that happened for me over the pandemic is I became increasingly afraid of social media,” he shares.
While albums are always full of messages, warnings, and comforts for listeners, they also reveal truths to their creators. In reflecting on that, Lauv contemplatively remarks, “If it’s taught me one things, it’s not to get lost in the sauce.” He delivers this line with complete sincerity before continuing, “Because, I think at times I’ve gotten lost in the sauce where I start confusing my songs with my life, almost.” He clarifies, “I got very lost in the idea of this music.”
To break out of that, he started changing up his process and relinquishing control, inviting in a few trusted producers and allowing himself to possibly say something stupid in the name of creating art. “I’m not gonna think, I’m just gonna turn the microphone on for five or ten minutes while these chords are playing in the background, and I’m gonna see if a whole song comes out. That’s what ended up happening for most of this album and that made it sound different, a lot more immediate.”
With less of a guard than ever, unafraid of appearance in substance or process, Lauv has come to a place of apparent comfort in himself in the lead up to this album. While life is an evolving struggle – he’d mentioned on Instagram the morning before the meeting he was feeling particularly anxious – he’s coming from a much more grounded place than before. It comes through in his demeanor, open and smiling as he accepts questions and gives them thorough, carefully considered answers. Sitting with his knee propped to his chest, he shares a palpable excitement about the album and unreservedly jams out to his own unreleased tracks as they play. Throughout the hour, it becomes abundantly clear why his music has managed to touch such a wide variety of listeners.
Lauv has experienced quite the rollercoaster ride since he left his college years, which left me wondering what he would say if the time machine in the “Kids Are Born Stars” music video dropped him off at NYU instead of his childhood neighborhood. He immediately broke into a massive grin and laughed as he considered what to say to his hypothetical past self. “I would probably tell him to hold on and not get carried away,” he starts before interrupting himself. “I wanna say I would say, ‘Hold on,’ and just stick with that, but part of life and part of, for me, early 20s is losing yourself and letting yourself get lost in whatever life is and kinda coming back.”
So, instead, with another cascade of laughter, he offers a new slogan, “You’re doing great, sweetie.”
musings 